if they outright forced us to stop day one there’d be outrage, so they instead ease us in. first a popup, then a timed popup, slowly leading to their actual goal but without the risk of an initial outrage. i know this is an extreme comparison but we’re like lambs to a slaughter
My blind guess is they are doing split testing with various ad-blocking measures.
Whenever someone interacts with the message, they know the popup worked. Best reaction is currently to use uBlock Origin’s element picker or zapper to hide the popup.
The company is likely gathering data in various blocking methods to see which is the most foolproof.
This is similar to what viruses do to determine if they’re on a real computer instead or just a sandbox. Most antiviruses will run an unfamiliar program in a sandbox (virtual machine) and if it starts doing malware things, flags it and sends it to quarantine. One known weakness of these sandboxes is that they cannot interact with the program, so a lot of viruses will put their payload behind a window. Any interaction with the window will signal to the virus that it’s on a real computer and it will deliver the payload, otherwise it will keep quiet to stay under the radar.
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As with all “why don’t you just” statements I’m sure the engineers thought of that. Personally I think it is kind of nice that someone with technical know-how can completely neuter a virus that’s literally active and running on their computer by doing absolutely nothing.
Virtual staredown.
Thank you. I’d forgotten that uBlock had the zapper function